A. Russo – More than the sum of my parts.

This is a first for me, so I gotta share. Sharing is caring, right? 😀 A friend of mine pointed out to me back in December that Love Lane Books had an open call for new and aspiring authors to submit a short story for a Valentine’s Day anthology.

I’ve never written a short story.

I’m not particularly fond of Valentine’s Day.

It was due for submission in less than a month.

BUT, I really wanted to try. I’m usually keen to try anything that I haven’t done before. I’ve never written something so short. It had to be professionally edited before submission, and (*gulp*) I will admit, I’ve never worked with an editor before because they’re SCARY.

Could I do this? Could I write something short but poignant, let someone else mark it up with red and tell me how terrible I am at writing, then submit it and potentially have someone ELSE tell me how terrible I am at writing??

PANIC.

As it turns out, none of those things happened. The editor I worked with was incredibly kind, very professional, and she had lots of great pointers for me. I did get my story finished within the allotted word count. It was edited before the submission deadline. I sat on it for almost a week, thinking maybe I’d just be happy I wrote it and tuck it away nice and neat somewhere. Pretty sure I almost passed out when I hit the ‘send’ button on my email. And then I had to wait.

I know every author has probably gone through this at some point, and maybe it’s trivial now. To me, this is a BIG DEAL. They liked it, and it will be in the anthology! I’m so psyched about it, because the whole writing/editing/submission process is new to me, and this is the very first time in my (ridiculously short and not at all lucrative) writing career that someone ELSE has said ‘yes, publish this.’ That’s so fuckin’ cool!

It’s from Love Lane Books, and it’s called Valentine Delights. It’ll be out on February 12th, and, the best part, it’s FREE. It’ll be available on All Romance Ebooks (did I mention the FREE part?).

So excuse my blatant plug which will probably be repeated incessantly until February 12th (okay, yeah, probably after that too). I’m kinda over the moon about this, and really excited for you to read what I came up with. There’s quite a lot of ‘me’ in it, I think. It’s not exactly contemporary, but it’s also not exactly historical while not exactly being fantasy either. So I’ve narrowed it down for you, yes?

You’ll just have to read it and see. 😀

~Arin.